Driving on “deficient roads” costs motorists in California more than $53 billion a year, and those in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana area are shelling out on average $2,800 annually as a result, according to a new report from a transportation research group.

Poorly maintained and designed roads damage vehicles, cause traffic congestion and contribute to traffic collisions, Rocky Moretti, director of policy and research for the group TRIP, said at a news conference Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles.

Sixty percent of major locally and state-maintained roads and highways in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana region were found to be in “poor” condition, compared with 37 percent statewide, according to the report “California Transportation By the Numbers: Meeting the State’s Need for Safe, Smooth and Efficient Mobility.” Twenty-three percent of roads and highways in the L.A. region were found to be “mediocre.”

“These are roads that are among the most heavily traveled in the country; they’re essentially worn out because these are older highways and streets where transportation agencies haven’t had the resources in place to make the ongoing repairs that are needed,” Moretti said.

As roads fall into poorer condition, the cost of repairing them becomes more costly and sometimes requires reconstruction, he said.

The findings were not surprising for Julia Callahan, a 32-year-old book publisher who lives in Los Angeles.

“I pay a lot of money to fix my car. I replace my brakes a lot more than I thought I would and a lot more than my parents do” living in Santa Cruz, she said. “I’ve had to replace all sorts of things.”

Callahan said she takes public transit to work from the East Hollywood area to Pershing Square downtown, which is one of the ways she cuts down on wear-and-tear to her car.

San Diego motorists paid the lowest for driving on deficient roads out of California’s large urban areas — about $1,860 a year on average — while the Los Angeles and San Francisco regions roughly tied for the highest amount at about $2,825 a year.

The report also found that the average commuter in the Los Angeles area is now spending an additional 80 hours annually — what amounts to two workweeks — stuck in traffic because of increased congestion, Moretti said.

Traffic leveled off after 2008 as a result of the economic downturn but is now increasing again with lower fuel prices. In 2015, vehicle travel increased 5 percent over 2014, which Moretti called “a very significant increase.”

The future doesn’t look any better. TRIP estimates that travel on California’s road and highways will increase by another 15 percent by 2030.

In addition, an average of 2,887 fatalities occurred on California’s roads in the past five years, and the fatality rate on noninterstate rural roads is nearly four times higher than all other roads in the state, according to the report.

The report underscores the state’s “desperate need for adequate and sustainable sources” of transportation funding, said Carrie Bowen, director of Caltrans’ District 7.

The state highway system has a $5.7 billion annual need in unfunded maintenance projects and has had more than $750 million in cuts to state highway projects in the past year, she said.

The state is not raising as much tax revenue on gasoline, which funds Caltrans projects, due to the popularity of fuel-efficient cars and lower gas prices, officials said.

The state is piloting a program that could replace California’s gas tax. It would charge drivers to help maintain roads based on the distance they travel or the amount of time they use the roads rather than the amount of gasoline they consume.

“We need a multimodal approach to transportation that includes trains, that includes transit … that includes bicycles, that includes any mode of transportation, including pedestrians,” she said.

Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the metro planning organization Southern California Association of Governments, argued that the six counties they represent — L.A., Ventura, Imperial, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange — are not getting their fair share of transportation funds from the state.

While the SCAG region represents nearly 50 percent of the state, it earned only about 20 percent of total cap-and-trade revenues — generated by a program designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — last year. Ikhrata is hoping to get the guidelines changed for distribution of that funding so that areas outside of core urban areas, such as the Inland Empire, can still compete.

“We really very much need to maintain the infrastructure we have — let alone a new one,” Ikhrata said. “There are (more than 2,000) bridges in the SCAG region that are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. If we don’t maintain them, it becomes a safety issue at some point.”

Brenda Gazzar is a multilingual multimedia reporter who has worked for a variety of news outlets in California and in the Middle East since 2000. She has covered a range of issues, including breaking news, immigration, law and order, race, religion and gender issues, politics, human interest stories and education. Besides the Los Angeles Daily News and its sister papers, her work has been published by Reuters, the Denver Post, Ms. Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, The Cairo Times and others. Brenda speaks Spanish, Hebrew and intermediate Arabic and is the recipient of national, state and regional awards, including a National Headliners Award and one from the Associated Press News Executives' Council. She holds a dual master's degree in Communications/Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

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